Friday, January 7, 2011

Here's what you missed: Nugs, Chillin', and Grindage

It's a new year and here's a new blog for you reader[s] out there. Seeing as how I tend to lean pretty heavily on the LEGO stuff, I was gonna basically just rattle off all the new sets I got for and around Christmas, but I feel that would be terribly uninteresting for pretty much everyone. Suffice it to say I got some mustard stuff, though. And that may well be all I say about that. For now.

Here are some movie opinions, because there seems to be a rash lately of better-than-average films out there. I'm sitting here listening to the TRON soundtrack rather than buying it, because I am cheap. And besides, it's computer music, and it feels only fitting I should listen to it exclusively via the computer. However, I have yet to see the movie for which the music is meant to accompany, and I'm not sure where in relation to the fence I sit regarding that. I know I really wanted to, though. I DID see Black Swan, and it is a movie you should stop reading this and go see. Natalie Portman has always been hot, but she seems hottest at her craziest, and she is coco for kookoo puffs in this movie. Plus: lady kissing. And there's still True Grit and Barney's Version to see as well. [Sidebar: I went to school with Mordecai Richler's... grand-nephew? Third cousin? They were somehow related, is what I'm saying. So, you know. That.]

It occurs to me that back in my first post I made the promise of making a habit of discussing three things here: toys, food, and people on the subway being idiots. I've certainly done the first, glossed over the second, and generally neglected the third. Well, hold on to your butts, it's about to get real in here.

The Story of My Fight on the Subway

and how I went from wrong to right by virtue of being less crazy

I will be using visual aides for this anecdote. The kids like the pictures, you see. The story today features a cast of thousands, but only two people really matter.

You can see I've sort of been letting myself go lately.

Now, if you've never had the pleasure of riding the Better Way during rush hour, you should know some things. Transit riders in Toronto, from around 4:30 to 7, suddenly start behaving as if they've very recently awoken from anesthesia in a place they've never seen before. They get very slow and very dumb is what that means. I, however, seem to get very fast and uncharacteristically angry. Now, right off the bat, I'll admit that I'm part of the problem. I get Escalator Rage. I'm working towards bettering myself, and it's coming along a day at a time. But it's tough when you're transferring, and you need to get on a subway only going one stop in order to catch a bus that only comes when it wants to and you have about 2 minutes of padding. So there's where my head was at.

There are stairs and there are escalators. And there are about a million more people.

The problem as I see it with most subway stations at rush hour, especially at Yonge, is that there are single unidirectional escalators next to a stairway, and the flood of people just sorta gushes all about the place like a broken water main. The lower platform, where I'm coming from, is a fairly limited space. I feel that the primary concern should be to empty the lower zone before refilling it, but people, in their infinite dumbness, don't really think this through. So we get the down escalator pulling people down, and we get the stairway also flooding people down, and the only way out is a slow, gooney single-file line up. This... irks me.

I'm not proud to admit that I mutter when angry. I will definitely be a mutterer as an old man.

Like a football player [I think?], I found a slight gap between the crushing downward flow, and the numbing outward creep. And yes, somewhere in there I may have edged my shoulder past a dude. But that remains unproven. I may have also said something angry about the escalators. But that's so unlike me that I don't believe it.

I was also carrying a heavy bag of groceries, I should add.

I realized my plan was flawed when the down-flow jumped up to two people wide [I guess people are expected to exit the station via the tunnels] and was lamenting this under my breath when I feel a jab in my ribs. Seriously, this guy jabbed and then pushed himself ahead of me. Then he got crabby.

The accent may not be completely accurate.

Fiery with anger.

I'm not exactly big on confrontation, and, you know, the guy was kind of right. I was the pushy asshole on the stairs, and I sort of hate that guy [slightly less than I hate the slow people or the people going down stairs when they have a perfectly functional and directionally-dedicated escalator that I DON'T have the option of taking], but really. His dedication to airing my wrongs in a public forum was having the net effect of slowing everyone down even more. And besides, pushing on the stairs? That's just dangerous, chief.

So instead of appealing to his sense of logic with sad tales of the rapidly melting hot pockets in my grocery bag, I leveled this zinger at him:

I have a team of writers helping me come up with this stuff.

He may not have actually heard me though, blinded by righteous indignation as he was. Instead of being right in this situation, he sort of just continued ranting away.

And then he got SERVED in this blog.

And I totally did miss the subway that was right there, and I totally did miss the bus. If Clownshoes hada let me pass, I totally would have been home a whole 20 minutes earlier!!